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Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

Puts You In the Moment

11:14 / 18.10.08

So, earlier today, I was trying to sell someone on Sabrina and Halloween (the originals, I mean), and my pitch boiled down to their effectiveness even on repeat watchings.

Halloween still scares me when I watch it, especially if I watch it alone, in the dark, you know the score but the point is, I know what's going to happen, how and when it's going to happen, and I still get that hollow feeling in my chest and my heart up in my throat. I know where Vertigo is going, I know the reveals and the paranoia, the obsessions and desperations, but the movie catches me and toys with me like a tom full of catnip peeling apart a little mouse. I can't not swoon, or get alternatingly frustrated or empathetically nervous, watching Sabrina, no matter how much I know everything's going to work out alright in the end.

There are far more movies I can rewatch and still get a comfortable sort of entertainment from, movies I can half-watch while doing something else, or don't mind when there's commercial breaks because I'm so familiar, but that subset that have full power over me every single time is a rare sort.

What movies do that for you? Or, do you become cold and enured to a flick as soon as you've seen it twice?

16:10 / 18.10.08

Two that I always think of offhand...

Back To The Future... Two and Three are great movies, but the first one never fails to pump my flux capacitor and pull me along at 88 mph. Every single time, that movie just makes me irrationally happy. It's just pure, uncut, straight-to-the-vein, clockwork cinema. A large part of must have to do with how much I watched it as an excitable child, but that score, mixed with all the more ridiculous parts of the eighties pumped full of unselfconscious enthusiasm. I likes me some unselfconscious enthusiasm.

Dazed and Confused is a perfect film to me. There isn't a single scene or line of dialogue in that movie that doesn't tell you worlds about the characters you're watching. Ben Affleck's best role ever (convinced it's because it's a movie where he plays a total dick). It just perfectly recreates a time and a place, it puts me right there with those people and always makes me feel by the time the end credits come up with the sun it always makes me feel that I have spent the greatest night of my life with them. Totally uplifting every time.

16:11 / 18.10.08

Oh.

Indy too. But that's a given, right?

19:43 / 18.10.08

Ring of Bright Water for me. Relaxes, enchants, transports. Lovely little film, perfect in fact.

06:16 / 19.10.08

'Triumph Of The Will'.

Hard to watch it these days without thinking of Oat Bran, or related. Gilded youths in fields of wheat. But it retains its power. In a way, wasn't this was the start of modern advertising?

06:30 / 20.10.08

Sneakers Seeing Dan Akroyd, River Phoenix, Sidney Poitier, Robert Redford, and Ben Kingsley all in a movie together is pure glee. Plus, screwing over the FBI for a cleared arrest record, a world vacation, a decked-out Winnebago, and peace on Earth just kicks far too much ass.

08:10 / 20.10.08

Back to the Future and Dazed and Confused are definitely on my list. BttF is so slick, so totally pure, it just glistens with perfection. I can't think of anything that would improve it. Obviously the politics are a bit suspect: one hard working American teen against fate, fate loses. But the film as a whole - it's structure - has a kind of aesthetic beauty that always gets under my skin.

Dazed and Confused because it's like distilled teenager juice. Fuck, when Sweet Emotion starts up the hair on the back of my neck never fails to stand on end.

15:23 / 20.10.08

I also trumpet Back to the Future, the final race for Marty to make the 88mph as the lightening hits always has me gripped.

I cry every time I watch Elephant Man.

16:16 / 20.10.08

The Goonies, Dark Crystal etc. but weirdly Team America still makes me laugh, and Miller's Crossing grips me even though I know what's going to happen.
Oh, and Withnail & I, Shaun of the Dead and Mallrats.

16:30 / 20.10.08

Harvey still brings a tear to my eye (soppy 'aporth that I am) when Elwood is is about to receive the serum, even though I know the ending.

I'll join in showing some love for Dazed and Confused, it just captures that teenage madness so well. I love the scene where Mitch is buying booze. Just perfect.

Tremors is the quintesential monster b-movie for me. I've watched it dozens of times and it's still great. The interplay between Fred Ward and Kevin Bacon is great.

16:48 / 20.10.08

I hold my breath and blink back tears at the end of Hidalgo. Not the best film ever, but it always gets me.

On a related note: When Viggo tells the Hobbits that they bow to no-one at the end of the Trilogy...*Choke-snif* (God I'm a sap)

Seeing Sinead cry in "Nothing compares 2U" always makes me want to hold her and kiss her tears away.

23:33 / 20.10.08

La Jetee always gives me chills, and, incredibly, I always miss the moving image. I know it's there, but some part of my brain switches into 'watching movies mode' and I forget to watch for it.

I always forget, also, that Olmi's Tree of Wooden Clogs is just a movie, and not something I'm experiencing myself. It's really that good.

09:03 / 21.10.08

Watching The Royal Tenenbaums last night choked me up as much as ever. My wife was in tears from Ritchie's 'Needle in the Hay' scene onwards; I managed to keep it together until "I've had a rough year, dad". And as I ever I laughed like a drain at "She's married... and she's your sister" and Bill Murray declaring "I want to die", and then going to take a bite of a biscuit and deciding against it. All that stuff. Years since I first saw it the movie still plays me like a fiddle.

13:37 / 21.10.08

Ratcatcher.

So much about this film is perfect. The atmosphere, the hard realism peppered with moments of fantasy. It's a fine balance but it's carried off so well.

The use of music is wonderful - Nick Drake, before he got Zach Braffinated, is the perfect soundtrack to the sequence with the pastoral excursion out to the building project. Likewise, the amazing Gamelan piece which crops up everywhere (it's in 'Badlands' and 'True Romance'. You know it, even if you don't) taps straight into the atmosphere of child-like wonder, undercutting all the grime and decay.

Mostly though, I'm a sucker for a child in jeapardy, which this movie has in heaps. The ending always has me in pieces.

Make us another one, Ramsay.

-

Also, If.... will, I suspect, always fill me with an urge to:

1 steal a motorbike
2 snog a greasy spoon waitress
3 drink vodka with friends wearing teeth round my neck
4 disrespect my elders
5 shoot up the place, like

Honourable sentiments.

Tuna Ghost: Pratt knot hero

00:02 / 22.10.08

Back to the Future has been on my list for about a decade and a half now. Even as a lad I thought Micheal J. Fox was the coolest kid in america. To this day, every time I adjust my tie and run my hand through my hair I think of him and smile, feeling a little bit cooler.

Other than that...hmmm. I'm only getting scenes rather than whole movies, must meditate further.

clever sobriquet

12:43 / 23.10.08

Wings of Desire never fails to restore a bit of my faith in humanity and the world. Particularly bad days end successfully in a viewing with several drinks and a cathartic cry of empathy and joy.

22:50 / 27.10.08

When Sarah Connor kills her son's adopted dad but Arnie still gives them a thumbs-up to the end. Choke. Tears.